Kristin McGee

Staging jazz pasts within commercial European jazz festivals: The case of the North Sea Jazz Festival

This article examines the North Sea Jazz Festival in order to highlight the growing influence of both ‘convergence culture’ (Jenkins) and prevailing jazz mythologies upon the reception and organization of contemporary European jazz festivals. In particular, the European jazz festival is examined within the context of increasing commercialization and digital mediation of the live music field. To stake my claim, I first sketch the context within which European jazz festivals arose, especially as initially driven by curators/aficionados, whose longing for ‘authentic’ jazz within natural (resort) surroundings provided the basis for our current European jazz mythology. Next, drawing from both secondary sources and journalistic reviews, I trace how the North Sea Jazz Festival transitioned from an independently curated event to a highly professionalized media festival in Rotterdam, northern Europe’s most modern, post-industrial jazz city. Finally, my close reading of the recent North Sea Jazz Festival’s headlining, crossover Dutch jazz artist, Caro Emerald, reveals how this transformation encouraged associations with the so-called European jazz myth, one which privileged Europeans’ connections to past American aesthetics and promoted New York–based jazz ‘heroes’ alongside crossover European jazz acts. My research draws from the fields of cultural studies, historiography, ethnomusicology and media studies to postulate a multidisciplinary theoretical perspective for examining jazz ideologies in light of large-scale transformations of festival culture.

Promoting affect and desire in the international world of Smooth Jazz

Abstract In this article, I suggest that the feminized and sexualized associations of smooth jazz as fashioned by the industry during the 1990s have since contributed to its vitriolic and sometimes hysterical denouncement by jazz performers and scholars. In particular, I uncover the affective, sexual, and gendered significance surrounding smooth jazzs reception to highlight the industrial complex precipitating its commercial ascent. Finally, I concretely interrogate these values by highlighting the work of Dutch saxophonist Candy Dulfer, emphasizing the industrial dimensions undergirding her reception as a highly successful 1990s instrumentalist whose work was often promoted as smooth jazz, despite the stylistic diversity of her recordings. Here I contrast industry discourse to those performative values expressed by Dulfer, while also recognizing the larger historical and cultural reception of jazz as a highly gendered, racialized, and sexualized cultural phenomenon. Ultimately I show how Dulfer both participated in and disrupted the feminized and sexualized associations of smooth jazz to artfully side-step the bonds of anxiety over legitimacy that might otherwise have confined her in an increasingly fragmented and international jazz world. By uncovering the semiotic significance attached to smooth jazzs promotion and reception, my analysis indirectly critiques dominant scholarly debates, which cumulatively and exclusively emphasize race and ethnicity (over gender or sexuality) as essential constructs influencing jazzs broader cultural significance. These biases have led to under-developed conceptualizations of jazzs complex professionalization during the late-twentieth century.AbstractIn this article, I suggest that the feminized and sexualized associations of smooth jazz as fashioned by the industry during the 1990s have since contributed to its vitriolic and sometimes hysterical denouncement by jazz performers and scholars. In particular, I uncover the affective, sexual, and gendered significance surrounding smooth jazzs reception to highlight the industrial complex precipitating its commercial ascent. Finally, I concretely interrogate these values by highlighting the work of Dutch saxophonist Candy Dulfer, emphasizing the industrial dimensions undergirding her reception as a highly successful 1990s instrumentalist whose work was often promoted as smooth jazz, despite the stylistic diversity of her recordings. Here I contrast industry discourse to those performative values expressed by Dulfer, while also recognizing the larger historical and cultural reception of jazz as a highly gendered, racialized, and sexualized cultural phenomenon. Ultimately I show how Dulfer both part...